Book Review: Take a Look at the Five and Dime by Connie Willis
Connie Willis delivers a charming, cozy holiday story with Take a Look at the Five and Dime. Technically, it’s a light sci-fi tale where the flashbulb memory experiment adds a subtle speculative twist. But the real heart of the story is in the characters and their relationships.
Grandma Elving steals the show with her obsessive retelling of a Christmas she spent working at Woolworths. Her family finds it exasperating, but Lassiter, the new boyfriend of Ori’s kind-of-maybe-step-sister, suspects there’s more beneath the surface, perhaps a hidden trauma linked to the memory. This thread of mystery, combined with family quirks and a touch of romance, makes the story warm, funny, and endearingly relatable.
I especially enjoyed how Willis captures the small tensions, joys, and eccentricities of a big family during the holidays. The pacing is gentle, the tone light, and the story is the perfect length to read in one cozy sitting. While the sci-fi is minimal, it doesn’t feel out of place; it just adds a little extra flavor to an otherwise human-centered, festive story.
Take a Look at the Five and Dime is an ideal holiday read if you want something heartwarming, charming, and lightly mysterious. It’s the kind of story that makes you smile at family antics while appreciating the small threads that hold people together, and it’s perfect with a cup of cocoa by the fire.
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